[Discussion] What do you think of RPG Maker MV?

It does look very nice, yeah. It'd be amazing to have Essentials working properly on both PC and Mac if we did eventually get it working, and even better to have fangames playable on portable devices (although in the case of iOS I can only imagine that'd involve fiddling around with sideloading and/or jailbreaking, since it's prooooobably a bad idea to attempt to distribute fan-made Pokémon games through Apple's App Store... granted it'd also be a bad idea to distribute through the Play Store, but at least sideloading on Android is much simpler). The .js plugins seem like they'd be pretty convenient, too, even outside the fact that I personally know more JavaScript than Ruby. Also, mouse support out of the box!

Bit unfortunate that it's $80, though. That's... actually quite cheap compared to other top-tier modern game makers/the paid versions of otherwise free game makers like Stencyl or Construct2, and so is probably perfectly acceptable for people who are serious about game dev in general, but I can see it being a stumbling block for some. You may not want to pay that much if you're only planning to make one game, for example. XP's much lower price will probably keep it pretty popular for a while yet. That's not a bad thing, mind, as it's always nice to have options.

I'm not going to lie, there's a tiny part of me that's tempted to see what I could do as far as attempting a conversion for the Essentials kit.. Of course, realistically that is a terrible idea, because at this stage I don't know Essentials or RMXP anywhere near well enough to handle all of that work properly. Wouldn't even know which scripts to start the port with, haha. I think for now I'll just content myself with messing around with XP and actually learning how to do stuff, and then, hey, maybe one day when I actually know what I'm talking about and have some time to boot, I might give it a poke. Unlikely, but it's nice to have a few pie-in-the-sky project ideas, eh?

We'll have to see what RMMV is like when it comes out, at any rate! Maybe it'll be relatively simple to convert Essentials and just require the (massive amount of) time needed to comb through every script and port it from RGSS to JS, maybe it'll be a lot more difficult due to changes in the way maps are handled or whatever else might be different, but either way it is nice to see the RPG Maker series finally catching up with the times and should be very good for original RPGs if nothing else.

I prefer Ruby than JavaScript (even with ECMA 6), so I'm sad that Enterbrain abandoned this nice language.

The portability is awesome! I only doubt about MV performance, since all export options converts into in HTML5, actually. We need a JIT or even AOT compiler! I still prefer to wait Neko RPGXP Player evolve that uses the incredible ruby.

One of best this it's that each section it's on a separate file.js and the data files are all JSON, so this make easier to use versioning software like Hg and SVN and post projects like Essentials on repositories like GitHub.

The other features are almost all easily done by scripts in XP. The 48x48 tiles are a bad idea, but, since pokémon ones are 16x16, the devs there there no problem adapting.

Anyway, RPG Maker is still below other engines in terms of features and price. Even the powerful Unreal is free! RPG Maker MV only get too much money because of this easy-to-use style and established fanbase.

Rayquaza. said:

Bottom line, we need a Pokémon Essentials kit for this when it comes out. I personally think this version is too good to not have a starter kit for because the potential of this thing is pretty huge.​

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Epic takes in a constant stream of royalties (or a very big up-front payment) from the people who produce commercial titles with Unreal Engine, though. They can afford to introduce the offer of UE4 for free* because of their position and how widely used it is in the top level of the industry compared to the sucess of RPG Maker games.

COOLTRAINER♂ said:

Epic takes in a constant stream of royalties (or a very big up-front payment) from the people who produce commercial titles with Unreal Engine, though. They can afford to introduce the offer of UE4 for free* because of their position and how widely used it is in the top level of the industry compared to the sucess of RPG Maker games.

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This was just one example. Stencyl, Wolf Editor and even GameMaker: Studio have nice free plans or are free. RPG Maker mainly use his fame to get money without a decent free plan.

I would call it "reduced workload" more than I would "fame", although people definitely do shell out more money just for a brand they think is fancy—'sup, Apple. You're paying for the convenience of having the complicated groundwork done for you, which is what makes it appealing to people who don't intend to get into full-on programming. Stencyl and whatnot are free/have free plans and are more flexible, sure, but what you're saving in money you're paying in extra time spent building and debugging the base of your game (especially as far as RPGs go—Stencyl and the like require a lot more work to get a functional RPG off the ground than they do a platformer or something). I'm not entirely sure the comparison to free things is 100% apt thanks to that difference in audience.

$80 really isn't bad compared to other paid options, at least, but I do still think it's a bit pricey for the casual game creators it's aimed at. Stencyl is a minimum of $99 for the studio plan, and it's going to add up to more if you intend to keep renewing your subscription, but you're also probably only paying for it in the first place if you intend to make and sell a lot of games anyway. Like I said, if you're just going to make one game, it's going to take a lot more to justify paying 80 bucks than it is 25. That's probably the most unfortunate thing about MV, really. I'm not against people receiving compensation for producing good software, but it sure would be nice if it were at least closer to XP's original price range.

Stencyl Free is also severely restricted to Flash (a dying platform bad idea) and Game Maker costs a lot more to get platform support other than Windows (both also have forced branding to some extent)

I'm not saying it's not a large hurdle for a lot of people in this kind of place (and unfortunate in this communities' case where we cannot possibly profit off titles that use an existing IP) but I don't think the price/feature comparison is that bad. Splitting off the platforms (moble at least) into seperate purchases like Game Maker would probably be a good idea, though.

I don't believe that it will replace Essentials just yet. People are too used to it and very great games can be made just from Essentials. It's just too much work ( Even for Maruno) to convert Ruby to Javascript so that we could use Essentials with this program .

Maybe someone might make a new Essentials like SDK with MV support from scratch because of language differences. It would be amazing if we could make custom games for Android but it would be double workload for the developers. So far custom games will still reign on the PC platform I'm afraid unless a miracle happens.

I have both XP and MV, and I'm really excited about the multi-platform support.
The one thing I can't stand about MV (and VX Ace before it) is the lack of a proper layering system. Instead of being able to set what layer you're placing tiles on, each tile has a preset layer. When you place a new tile, it automatically goes on top of any other tiles you've already placed there. Trying to change the ground under a cliff tile you just put down? Nope, you just changed the ground on top of the cliff. It's so much faster to just have one hand on the F5-F8 cluster when mapping than to have to deal with this.
If there was an Essentials equivalent in MV, I'd still probably use it. Despite the mapping being annoying, I'd still love to be able to export to mobile devices, and there are a couple of other features that XP will never be able to do.

I've been using XP since I was maybe 12 so I'm getting pretty used to how it works and switching would make it hard to use the new version at first. But regardless, if someone were to make an Essentials Kit for it, I would use it in a heartbeat.

The main reason why I'd prefer it over XP is that it uses Java instead of Ruby.
Seriously, this is huge to me. I hate Ruby and consider myself pretty skilled with Java so it'd make scripting so much easier.
Multi-platform is really nice too, but I don't care about it as much,

Schrroms said:

I've been using XP since I was maybe 12 so I'm getting pretty used to how it works and switching would make it hard to use the new version at first. But regardless, if someone were to make an Essentials Kit for it, I would use it in a heartbeat.

The main reason why I'd prefer it over XP is that it uses Java instead of Ruby.
Seriously, this is huge to me. I hate Ruby and consider myself pretty skilled with Java so it'd make scripting so much easier.
Multi-platform is really nice too, but I don't care about it as much,

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It actually uses JavaScript, which is very different from Java. (Though they do share a lot of similarities, like most programming languages do)

A Dork of Pork said:

It actually uses JavaScript, which is very different from Java. (Though they do share a lot of similarities, like most programming languages do)

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Aw crap, I thought it used Java.
Oh well the portability is still nice.

Played with it for few hours and I'm really interested in it. If we can create a team, we can bring simpler version of Pokemon Essential to RPG MAKER MV.

RPG Maker is making a comeback, especially thanks to indie companies such as Freebird Games. However MV wasn't the step up I was hoping it would be. Portability is great, but it still remains a quite unoptimised and weak program.

There's two main reasons I think porting Essentials to it is pointless 1) If you're going to spend that amount of time porting an engine you may as well do it in a better (free) game engine like Unity and 2) As soon as someone tries to release an Essentials game on a mobile platform you can kiss goodbye to anyone releasing a Pokémon game using MV. Immediate C&D. Nintendo will blacklist the program the same way they did with Flash. Portability is a massive threat to them. This is why RPG Maker XP games rarely (if ever) receive C&D letters, while Pokémon games made in portable engines do (Evoas in Flash etc.).

If one wanted to port Essentials to MV - go for it. However treat it as a learning experience because it is 99.9% likely that as soon as someone uses it to release their game on a mobile platform the project will be shut down. Rendering the engine almost pointless. Aside from that, I'm glad to see RPG Maker begin to catch up with the rest of the industry and actually allow for mobile development.

@BadSamatarian
I'm currently working on RPG Maker MV Essentials, and just reading you saying this only motivates me more to prove you wrong. There WILL be a Pokémon Essentials for RPG Maker MV, and it WILL be better than that of RPG Maker XP.

bratamatch said:

@BadSamatarian
I'm currently working on RPG Maker MV Essentials, and just reading you saying this only motivates me more to prove you wrong. There WILL be a Pokémon Essentials for RPG Maker MV, and it WILL be better than that of RPG Maker XP.

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I tried out MV, I honestly found it to be not very good. The way it handles/limits tilesets and the removal of the script editor are both pretty unfavorable imo. It made some improvements, but it's a step backwards from the ease of working with XP. Also, while you can use 32x32 tiles instead of 48x48, the change won't take place in the map editor. That's just poor craftsmanship.

bratamatch said:

@BadSamatarian
I'm currently working on RPG Maker MV Essentials, and just reading you saying this only motivates me more to prove you wrong. There WILL be a Pokémon Essentials for RPG Maker MV, and it WILL be better than that of RPG Maker XP.

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Why though? Pokemon Essentials for RPG Maker XP already has everything you need for a Pokemon game, save move animations, but you can find custom made ones anyway, and you would have to make them anew in RPG Maker MV anyway.

Overall it just isn't worth the effort IMO.

bratamatch said:

@BadSamatarian
I'm currently working on RPG Maker MV Essentials, and just reading you saying this only motivates me more to prove you wrong. There WILL be a Pokémon Essentials for RPG Maker MV, and it WILL be better than that of RPG Maker XP.

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Good luck porting more than 110k lines of Ruby code into JavaScript before ECMA 6.

mej71 said:

I tried out MV, I honestly found it to be not very good. The way it handles/limits tilesets and the removal of the script editor are both pretty unfavorable imo. It made some improvements, but it's a step backwards from the ease of working with XP. Also, while you can use 32x32 tiles instead of 48x48, the change won't take place in the map editor. That's just poor craftsmanship.

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Removal of script editor is one of best things ever! You can use any IDE/editor that you like (Geany, Atom, Sublime, Notepad++, among others). Anyway, pokémon uses 16x16 tiles, so it can resize into 48x48 without bigger problems.

FL said:

Good luck porting more than 110k lines of Ruby code into JavaScript before ECMA 6.

Removal of script editor is one of best things ever! You can use any IDE/editor that you like (Geany, Atom, Sublime, Notepad++, among others). Anyway, pokémon uses 16x16 tiles, so it can resize into 48x48 without bigger problems.

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You can already use whatever editor and just c+v. Now I have to have a ton of different files opened if I need to reference them. And while you're in that editor, you don't have any way of knowing which scripts are plugged in, or even which are activated without moving back to your plugin manager. Also, javascript is probably my least favorite language.